Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Ear Food

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, I tend to think the ears are… um… also important. More for the intake than the output, obviously. So… doors, maybe? Anyway…

Good music does good things for people.

No, I’m not talking about sappy hippy gunk like Lennon’s Imagine (can’t stand that song) or celebrities pontificating about Christmas in third world nations and whining about first worldproblems on their day off, no, I’m talking about music that doesn’t set out to preach. I’m talking about music that sets out to entertain and maybe uplift. I see it as something akin to Walt Disney’s famous quote:

…as in, I’m looking at music that just starts out to entertain, and if it happens to feed the soul or teach something along the way, that’s a bonus.

Anyway, I suppose I blame Syp and Syl for this, somewhat. They share good music clips here and there, so it gave me the itch to do the same. (Should I change my name to Syh or something to fit the mold better? Decisions, decisions…)

Most of the music I listen to while working or at home is from video game soundtracks. Occasionally I’ll splash something like Daft Punk’s TRON Legacy soundtrack in there (really good! …but how is putting the whole soundtrack online legit?), but it’s mostly game music. Convenient, then, that I work in the game industry, perhaps. Some of my favorites are as follows:

Mirror’s Edge, a quirky first person Parkour platformer, has a great theme song thisaway, titled Still Alive:

Which, of course, should not be confused with Portal‘s Still Alive song, which is also really good, but very different.

Bastion, a great little game, has a wonderful soundtrack. It’s different from the laid-back sort of music I usually prefer, but it just hits the spot when I’m looking for something a bit more adventurous. There’s the great Terminal March

I don’t play Skyrim, but this makes me want to. Sorta. I know, the game won’t let me be a killer violin-wielding bard or a chanting Viking, and it’s M-rated, which I avoid, but… that’s some good, stirring music.

Oh, and for the next 7 hours or so, the Humble Bundle guys have another great bundle up… and they are including the soundtracks. This is a fantastic move, and I hope we see more of this in the future. That’s how I got the Bastion and Swords & Sorcery soundtracks, which were each worth the price of the bundle alone, never mind all the other yummy goodness in each bundle. Games? Who has time to play those? The soundtracks, though, I can listen to while I do something else.

Kingdom Hearts is a favorite series of mine, ever since it was announced and I said “wait, er, what?” to the bizarre but fanboy dream pairing of Disney and SquareSoft. Y’see, I grew up wanting to be a Disney animator (and I could have worked into a Pixar job, but I won’t work in California), and played a fair dose of SquareSoft (now SquareEnix) games in my teens. My cultural DNA is infused with Disney and SquareSoft, so the pairing of the two just fit for me. It helps that the games are pretty fun. The first piece of music I heard was in the teaser trailer for the game, and I’ve been a fan of Yoko Shimomura’s work since. It’s a delightful mix of an orchestral score and Disney-flavored whimsy.

I would be remiss not to mention Nobuo Uematsu while we’re talking Squaresoft. He is brillant, even though he’s turning to the dark side in his old age *coughOtherworldBlackMagescough*. Dear Friends is an oldie but a goodie, though even better on the N Generation CD.

Speaking of SquareSoft, I’m a big fan of Yasunori Mitsuda’s work on Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. The OCRemix (a great resource, by the way) fan compilation “Chrono Symphonic” is also really good. My music appreciation gained a lot of depth staring with this ticking clock.

…and Frog’s Theme still makes me smile. Repetitive as it is, thanks to the nature of game music, it’s still a rousing theme for one of my favorite game heroes.

… but when I really need something to make my day better almost instantly, I often turn to Radical Dreamers (Chrono Cross OST, Yasunori Mitsuda). The whole 3-CD soundtrack is excellent, Scars of Time perfectly sets the mood (it plays during the game’s intro cinematic)

There’s a lot here in this industry to value. Even if it sometimes takes a distant back seat to the other trappings of modern gaming. There’s a lot of eye candy for those windows to the soul… and a lot of ear candy, too, for… um… whatever portal they are.

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9 Responses

CHRONO! On the rare occasions I sit down at the piano at Mom’s house, I pull out the Chrono book or the Final Fantasy one. Chrono is still my favorite game music, but I am LOVING that Bastion stuff. I really, really love it when people take the time and effort to put good music into games. I feel like it’s such an underrated art.

I bought a Humble Bundle *just* for the Bastion soundtrack. The games and other soundtracks were gravy, but the Bastion music alone is worth buying. Sure, you can listen to it all free online, from the devs, no less, but there’s something satisfying about buying it. You can listen to it offline, and you get to support great art.

I wish more games would make their soundtracks available for purchase, actually.

i agree, Chrono Trigger/Cross had some of the best music of the 2D eras. I still have the soundtrack on CD somewhere, I think.Unless that small crate I’m missing got lost on the last move, and not only misplaced…

I never got the infatuation with FF VII. In my eyes, it was a decent game, but not the singular best thing ever that some people make it out to be, plus hampered by the switch from gorgeous 2D to godawful early 3D graphics. The soundtrack had a few gems, though I never liked the opening theme or one-winged angel. My favorite might be Cosmo Canyon. FF X, on the other hand… you’re spot on to my taste with the Zanarkand theme! If I remember correctly, that was also used as the intro?

Finally, Skyrim does have great music. And the Zelda medley… it’s ok to listen to, but I had to switch to another tab to not have to look at the hyperactive dwarf who reminded me of a crossover between Vanessa Mae and André Rieu. What’s she DOING wiggling around with that violin like that? 😛

Looks like I mistakenly put in the “rock” rendition of One Winged Angel. It’s… not one I particularly care for. I’ll fix that. The orchestral version is OK, but you’re absolutely right, there are better FFVII tracks. I included that segment in a bit of a hurry. This post has been brewing for a while, and I kinda lost track of a few things.

I liked FFVII as a game, though it’s not my favorite in the series (VI gets my pick). I think it was a leap on the music side, though, since we now had CDs as the game media and could get a big step up in sound quality. It’s a bit like the step between CT and CC; both had excellent music, but the move to CDs let CC express Mitsuda’s melodies in richer tones.

I’m a big fan of the sweeping orchestral scores and the simple, clean, beautiful stuff like To Zanarkand. (Yes, I’m pretty sure it was in the intro… which made a good first impression.)

I don’t really *watch* the violinist, as she reminds me a bit of a hyperactive squirrel, but I do like her music. That works out, since this all really winds up as background music while I do something else.

FF VI was pretty nice. Though I have to admit, I didn’t play it until years later. My pick is probably X, but that’s also because it was the only one that I played immediately when it came out, and I was still _just_ young enough to be easily impressed. 😛

And of course, once you went from tracker music to CD-quality tracks, you got a lot more sound quality. On the other hand, I’m a sucker for the old tracker music. There were a lot of great scores from the 8-bit consoles and Amiga games (even some C64 ones). Hm, maybe I should make a post about my favorite tracker game music at some point!

Such wonderful tunes there, thank you very much!! you’ve made it hard for me to follow-up soon with a retro roundup, snatching some of my favs!! ^^
I gotta say, of the newer OSTs out there it’s Skyrim above all and then the new Fable, Castlevania and of course GW2 that stand apart for me.

I’m completely in the soundtrack mood again now, hehe….one day I really wanna go see that Nobuo Uematsu symphony orchestra – they tour around Europe sometimes.

[…] Mitsuda and Yoko Shimomura are still the backbone of that collection, some of which is noted in my last music article thisaway), but it has sort of been a trickle. Part of that is the expense of getting CDs often only […]